There was no question about it: As summer was slipping away, so too was what the Chinese would call chi and the yogis would call prana—my life force energy. Whether it was a mystery virus or a chronic ailment’s recurrence, something was depleting me of the vital juice that we see in such great abundance in children, that we feel when we run or dance, that we taste when we fall in love. Once it’s gone, you’ll do anything to get it back. So I reached out for help. For two weeks in September, I took a romp through the world of energy healing—a world that is esoteric, warm, wild, strange, mystical, earthy, and loving. I experienced a laying-on of hands at my heart center. I had aromatherapy oils feathered up my spine. I reclined on a bed under seven crystals aligned with my seven chakras. I received remote blasts of energy, and had angels and guides called up and invited to stay for a week or more. My inner skeptic raised an eyebrow, and my outer reporter asked a lot of questions, but mostly I received the gentle medicine with curiosity, openness, and a harvest-load of gratitude.
The Body Electric
You won’t find any double-blind placebo trials proving the efficacy of energy healing anytime soon. You’re unlikely to get a nod of approval from a white-coated MD or researcher that energy healing really works, though the medical establishment is starting to see the value of the alternative modality, which has been amping up in hospitals and hospices around the country. Reiki—the hands-on Japanese system that is the most well-known form of energy healing—is now on menus at many palliative care centers and cancer wards touting services designed to offer care on an emotional and spiritual level, and to improve quality of life. White Plains Hospital’s Dickstein Cancer Center, for example, now has integrative therapies including Reiki woven into their program. It’s the sign of a shift—what energy healers themselves might call an expansion of cultural consciousness or a raising of the collective frequencies. In other words, we’ve arrived. We’re in the flow.
Still, for the uninitiated (that’s most of us) energy healing remains a murky business. It is, after all, invisible, explains Simone Harari, who is trained in about 20 different holistic modalities and offers a wide variety of energy “technologies” at Simhara Portal of the Heart, her idyllic spa and wellness center in Stone Ridge. “Electricity cannot be seen, but no one questions that it’s running through the wiring when we turn on the lights. When the lights stop working we call electricians to come fix the wires so the electricity can flow. I facilitate the same thing for my clients, restoring the flow through the energetic pathways in their bodies,” says Harari. For people familiar with ancient healing systems like Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and yoga, there’s a whole vocabulary with which to talk about energy conduits and centers in the body, such as the chakras or wheels of energy located from the seat or root to the crown of the head. Yet whether or not we speak the lingo of energy, we all know that wilting, wanting feeling when we don’t have it.
Lights, Crystals, Action
Sinking into a plush couch at Simhara, surrounded by objects of beauty and aromatherapy scents, is a kind of healing in itself. But it’s nothing compared to the Raindrop Technique that Harari performs on a massage table in the adjacent treatment room. She begins at my feet, applying the first of nine essential oils in the rolling motion of Tibetan reflexology; next comes wave after wave of oils—oregano, thyme, basil, cypress, wintergreen, marjoram, aroma seiz, peppermint, and valor—whisked up my spine in alternating brush strokes. “It’s not just a massage,” she explains; it’s energy work inspired by the Lakota Indians who would take sick tribe members on a journey to the Northern Lights to receive their healing powers. Like a band of colored light, each oil has a specific frequency or function, says Harari. “They’re very supportive to the emotional, respiratory, and immune systems of the body.” The oils are also antimicrobial, making the Raindrop good for colds, flus, and inflammatory conditions. I leave almost giddy—feeling ten times lighter than when I’d arrived, and smelling like an herb garden.
A few days later I’m back, this time for hands-on healing followed by a whirl on Simhara’s Crystal Bed. As Harari works over me, she holds one hand on my heart as the other moves slowly in a figure-eight pattern across my torso. It isn’t long before I can feel it, the energy, moving in a subtle tingling sensation as if responding to her touch, which sometimes hovers a few inches above my physical body on what some would call my aura. “I feel like the client does the work, and I’m just a conduit, a channel of light and love,” she explains later. “When you allow that love to come through you to another person, the healing occurs.” Next comes the Crystal Bed, which invites you to lie down under a New Age-meets-the-Jetsons contraption with seven arms, each ending in a crystal infused with colored light. I “bathe” here for 20 minutes, the lights blinking Christmas-like over my seven chakra points. Harari says that each crystal has been blessed by John of God, a Brazilian healer and spiritual channel. She tells me that my angels and guides have been invited into the room, to raise my frequency.
I wish I could say I shook the hands of these ethereal beings—but no matter. Harari says they were working on me unseen. “I’ve had people with Lyme or lupus coming off the Crystal Bed feeling energized or pain free. I’ve had people with palpitations or anxiety who’ve said that’s gone now. I’ve had people come off the table and say they didn’t experience anything. It’s a very individual experience.”
Energy In, Peace Out
According to Brett Bevell, an energy healer and author based in Hyde Park, not everyone can feel subtle energetics, but we’re not lesser people if we can’t. “We all have different levels of energetic sensitivity—some people have more sense of energy, and some have less. In certain circles they think if you can’t feel the energy you’re not spiritually evolved. I disagree with that.” Bevell is a master of several different modalities, including Reiki and lesser-known forms like Vortex Healing, which borrows energy from the heart realm, and Magical Awakening—his preferred form—which is based on the Celtic concept of three cauldrons, or energy centers, at the navel, heart, and crown. “My clients find that it helps them get through stuff really fast. One woman, after three Magical Awakening sessions, felt that she no longer had to be in therapy, and she’d been in therapy for 15 years,” he says.
It was a difficult childhood that drew Bevell to energy healing in the first place; he’d tried traditional therapy and 12-step groups, but always felt a need to go deeper. “It wasn’t until I got into energy healing that things started to shift for me. I think it’s because there are energetic cords between us and whoever we’ve interacted with in our lives. In a childhood situation where there was a lot of trauma, you’ve still got energetic cords with those people. Energy healing is about cleaning up the cords, and releasing the debris or dirt so it’s not weighing you down anymore.” It makes sense that you’d treat energetic problems with energetic solutions—and Bevell says that most of the people who come to him want to work through mental or emotional issues, more often than physical ailments. “They come for emotional peace,” he says.
Working with Bevell can be a far-out experience, literally. Although he teaches at the Omega Institute and sometimes offers sessions at Izlind Integrative Wellness Center & Institute in Rhinebeck, his preferred mode is to send energy distantly, through time and space. He has clients in Hollywood who swear by his work. “I’ll send you a blast,” he offers during our interview—but while I expect him to stay on the phone and talk me through an experience, he instructs me to hang up and get comfortable. He’ll be sending the blast from Omega, over 25 miles away. As I lie on my bed and wait to feel something, I can’t help but wonder—are the energy satellites transmitting signals, or down because of the rain? Does the energetic envelope have the right zip code? Whether I feel it or not, Bevell has assured me, the energy will be working. Besides, just lying down after a long day feels pretty damn good.
The Energy Doctor Is In
What heals, anyway? Aruna Bakhru, MD—who has an internal medicine practice in Poughkeepsie along with a side practice focusing on alternative modalities—has given it a lot of thought. “Look at the placebo effect,” she says. “If someone is given a placebo and it works, was it the medication, or was it their own infinitely powerful mind? The mind is so powerful that it can create healing out of nothing.” Bakhru, who grew up in India and immigrated to the United States as a child, is well-versed in the language of energetics. “In Ayurveda you have many bodies—a physical body, an energetic body, a soul,” she says. “All healing is energy healing.”
Bakhru came back to her roots when she started working with alternative modalities such as homeopathy, biofeedback, and flower essences—and she also reclaimed what’s missing from a lot of modern medicine: personal connection. In hospitals, she says, “We reach for the stars and the moon and we do these amazing things—open heart surgeries, this and that. It’s all excellent. But medicine has become very skewed. Doctors have just a few minutes face-to-face with a patient. The satisfaction is gone—the satisfaction of helping another human being. That’s what I got back doing these other modalities.” One woman came to her with knee pain, and while Bakhru recommended an orthopedic surgeon, the person insisted on working with her energetically. With biofeedback, they discovered that she was carrying a lot of resentment; once she cleared that, her knee pain went away.
Some might say that energy healing is about being open to mystery, or believing in a kind of magic. For Bakhru, it’s a lot more practical: “The ultimate analysis, in my belief, is that we heal because of our own inner permission.” Harari agrees—and her heady oils, warm hands, and Crystal Bed are only tools in the deep work that must happen within each unique being who comes to her. “I’m just the vessel,” she says. “It’s the people that heal themselves.”
RESOURCES
Aruna Bakhru, MD Thecenterforenergymedicine.com
Brett Bevell Brettbevell.com
Simone Harari, PsyD Simhara.com
This article appears in October 2015.
